Duncan Macbeth

Piccadilly Goldmine

In this article, Duncan Macbeth develops the case against Capitalism in terms of urban planning and reconstruction.

before the war capitalist society exhibited obvious symptoms of disease—the feverish stock exchange boom, the slump, mass unemployment, the derelict areas, poverty in the midst of plenty. Today these symptoms have largely (though perhaps temporarily) disappeared. The stock exchange boom is with us, but not the slump, and the Conservative Party has been swept back to power on the full tide of “prosperity”. It is less obvious, but nevertheless true, that the kind of prosperity we are experiencing can, like poverty, be a disease, and give rise to forms of crisis as difficult to solve as those we experienced before the war.